


sometimes I doubt your commitment to sparkle motion

by Aramley



Category: Tennis RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Twilight Fusion, Crack, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-08-26
Updated: 2010-08-26
Packaged: 2017-12-17 20:04:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,726
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/871446
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aramley/pseuds/Aramley
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>How Novak Djokovic and the Twilight Saga join forces to ruin Gilles Simon's life.</p>
            </blockquote>





	sometimes I doubt your commitment to sparkle motion

**Author's Note:**

> An extended joke based on a comment by Novak Djokovic (in a video now sadly missing from the internet) that Gilles Simon looks like Robert Pattinson. Never let it be said that I don't run with my ideas.
> 
> Originally posted [here](http://aramleys-words.livejournal.com/11169.html).

“You know who you remind me of,” Novak says, when they're cooling off from practice together. “You remind me of that guy.”

Gilles wipes the sweat from his cheekbones with the flat of his wrist and says, “That guy.”

“That guy,” Novak elaborates, waving a hand around. “The vampire guy, you know, from that movie.”

Gilles thinks, but he doesn’t watch a lot of movies, and the only vampire he knows is, “Dracula?”

“No,” Novak says, laughing. “The new one, with the sparkle.”

“Sparkle,” Gilles says. He sometimes feels like he only understands half of what Novak says, and that’s on a good day, when Novak is making sense.

“The – Edward,” Novak says. He snaps his fingers triumphantly. “Edward, from _Twilight_.”

“Oh,” Gilles says. “Is that good?”

-

“Have you heard of _Twilight_?” Gilles asks Gael later, because Gael is the sort of person you go to for these things.

“Of what?” says Gael, mostly because he has one earbud of his iPhone in and Gilles can hear the pulsating tinny bass from all the way across the room.

Gilles cups his hands around his mouth in a makeshift megaphone and says, louder, “ _Twilight_.”

Gael rolls his eyes, but works the other earbud out. “You mean those books?”

“They’re books?” Gilles shrugs. “I thought it was a movie.”

“It’s books and movies,” Gael explains. He swings his long legs off the edge of the bed and leans over to rummage in a duffel bag at the base of the nightstand. “Here,” he says, straightening up, and tosses something at Gilles that hits him square in the chest with a sharp corner.

“Motherfucker,” says Gilles, rubbing at the place with one hand. He reaches down and picks up the book, and smoothes a palm across the black cover, _Fascination_ printed in shiny silver above a big red apple cupped in two white hands.

“Sorry,” says Gael, with an apologetic half-shrug mostly lost under his hoodie. “Anyway, that’s _Twilight._ ”

Gilles turns the book over and reads the blurb on the back cover. “Can I borrow this?”

“What?” Gael has his earbuds in again, and he’s looking down at the phone with his long fingers working over it with practised dexterity. He’s probably tweeting.

“Never mind,” says Gilles. He takes the book with him when he leaves.

-

It’s a long flight back to Paris and Gilles spends it reading _Twilight_. It’s like some sort of weird compulsion, he thinks, about four hours in. Like the way his mother complains about the same overblown terrible soap operas she’s watched for twenty years, and the way she always says she’s going to give up after this episode, alright this next one, okay really this time I mean it, it’s just too bad, and she never does. Gilles is always going to read just one page more and stop.

He’s halfway through the book by the time the plane taxis to the terminal at Charles de Gaulle.

-

“Why are you reading a girl book?” Jo says, leaning over the seat as they bus to Davis Cup practice.

Gilles blinks and extracts himself with difficulty from Edward and James and the ballet studio fight. “What?”

“I said, why are you reading a girl book?”

“Fuck you,” Gilles sighs. He bends the corner of his page over so as not to lose his place, because he has the feeling this could take a while. “Gael gave it to me.”

“Gael,” says Jo, turning to him with a look of disappointment that’s only half faked, “why did you give Gilles a girl book to read?”

“Because he asked me for it,” says Gael, with a look at Gilles that plainly says, _if you think you’re dumping this on me, you can think again._

Gilles says, “Well, why did you have it in the first place?”

“My thirteen year old girl cousin left it in my bag,” says Gael, and then, “Hey, maybe you two would get along.”

Jo laughs and Gael grins and watches him, because Gael is love with Jo and really fucking obvious about it. Gilles hates them both. Richard, in his seat at the back, looks at Gilles and rolls his eyes and then goes back to ignoring everybody.

-

The sun filters down through the trees in pools and splashes of vivid colour amongst the drab, shaded greens and browns.

“This is the skin of a killer,” Gilles says, and he stretches his hand out into one of the lancing shafts of brightness, sunlight coruscating improbably against the icy pallor.

“Stop it,” says Novak. He reaches out and curls his fingers around Gilles’ wrist, tight. Gilles looks at his fingers, pink and human against the mica glint of his own skin. “It’s beautiful. You’re beautiful.”

“You don’t know what you are talking about,” says Gilles. He could pull away easier than breathing, but he lets Novak keep him close the same way he lets Novak put a warm hand to Gilles’ cheek and force him to meet his eyes, because physical strength doesn’t make up for his other weaknesses.

“You’re beautiful,” Novak insists, and kisses him.

-

Gilles wakes with a start, thinking, _fuck, fuck, fuck, what the fuck_ , a litany that only increases in fervour as he comes to realise that he is actually, horribly, achingly hard.

“Fuck,” he says aloud, into the dark, and tries to will it to go down. It doesn’t. He lies there for an age, staring at the ceiling and thinking of the least sexy things he can imagine, like blister pads and sweaty training socks and sports massages, and he’s _still hard_. Eventually he admits defeat and rolls over, gritting his teeth as he shoves a hand into his underwear and jerks off fast and messy, thinking stubbornly of big-breasted blue-eyed blondes and not once, not even a little tiny bit, about Novak fucking Djokovic.

No more Twilight, he promises himself, when he’s done and panting into the pillow. In the morning, he’s tossing the damned book.

-

“Hey, Edward,” says Novak, hard _w_ like the _v_ in _vampire_ , and Gilles freezes before he manages to pull himself together.

“Hello,” he says, turning to meet Novak. “How are you?”

“Good,” Novak says. He looks good. God damn it. “Just heading off to practice. Do you want to practice together sometime? I can book a court later if you –“

“I can’t,” says Gilles, too quickly, and he makes himself shrug, loose-shouldered; _what can you do?_ “Sorry. It’s just, I have to, uh. I already say I will practice with Jo.”

“Oh,” says Novak. He shifts his racket bag against his shoulder. “Okay. Well, no problem. Maybe another time, yes?”

“Sure,” says Gilles, nodding, and then Novak heads off to his own practice court and leaves Gilles considering the length of his career, and the feasibility of avoiding Novak for the rest of it. He’s twenty-four now so that’s, what, eight years? He can do that.

-

When he gets injured he supposes it’s a kind of blessing in disguise, because while there’s the nagging pain in his knee and the awful feeling of time and ranking points slipping through his fingers, at least he doesn’t have to see Novak every day.

-

He’s been at home three days when the package shows up. Gilles hasn’t ordered anything, and he attempts to explain this to the delivery man, who only shrugs like that could not physically be further from being his problem. Gilles opts for the path of least resistance and signs.

He guts the package on the kitchen counter and pulls the books out one by one: _Tentation_ , then _Hésitation_ , and _Révélation_. The rest of the _Twilight_ books. At the bottom of the parcel is a printed letter with the message: _Enjoy! J + G_. Jo and Gael, Gilles thinks, and reaches for his phone.

 _You fuckers_ , he texts both of them.

 _what_ , Jo texts back a minute later, _have you grown out of them already? :(_

-

The problem with not being able to play tennis is that it throws into uncomfortably sharp relief his otherwise total lack of a life. His apartment is the kind of scruffy minimalist that’s less aesthetic choice than it is the result not being there often enough to fill it with things that aren’t unstrung rackets or outdated kits badly in need of laundering. His friends are on tour. His longest conversations are with his physio and his mother.

So yeah, he reads the books.

-

“Are you alright?”

Novak stretches out languorously beneath him, and their bare bodies brush together. “Yeah,” he says, with a very slow, suggestive smile. “Yeah.”

Gilles matches his fingertips to a purpling bracelet of bruises at Novak’s wrist. “I hurt you.”

“Just a little,” says Novak. He presses another bruise on his forearm, and hisses a little.

“I didn’t want to hurt you,” Gilles says, stricken.

“For God’s sake,” Novak says, and laughs as he hooks a leg over Gilles’ hip to draw him closer in, as if they could be pressed any closer together than they already are. He nips the sharp line of Gilles’ jaw and murmurs, “Will you stop it? You are _killing_ the buzz.”

-

“Fuck,” Gilles says, into the pillow, before he’s even opened his eyes. “This is just – ugh. Ridiculous.”

He forces himself up and into a shower that’s a good few degrees cooler than he usually likes it, cold enough to shock the breath out of him and sluice away any lingering traces of arousal, and stays there bracing himself against the cool slick tile until the dream has swirled away.

He eats breakfast and does some stretches with the knee, which feels good enough that the physio thinks he could be back on court in a week, and then he sits down in front of the tv and kicks the doorstop-thick tome of _Révélation_ off the coffee table in order to put his feet up on it. The book falls with a satisfyingly indignant thud.

He switches to the sport channel, which is showing tennis –is showing Novak, halfway through the second set, and Gilles forces himself not to switch over. He is going to be sensible about this. It is competition research.

So he watches as Novak utterly dismantles the poor qualifier with his best sharp, angular game, clean and beautifully precise, a forehand punch to the corner followed by the teasing whisper of a dropshot; devastatingly effective and – Jesus Christ, Gilles thinks, scrubbing a defeated hand across his eyes – devastatingly sexy.

He wants to pinch himself, because this _has_ to be a dream, except for how even the dreams in which he is a sparkling vampire are less ridiculous than getting turned on by the elegant turn of a slice backhand, or the angles of Novak’s shoulders when he reaches up to serve, or worst of all the glimpse of bare skin as Novak exchanges his sweat-soaked shirt for a fresh one at the changeover.

At this point there is no use even pretending that he isn’t insane, and it seems almost self-defeating not to slip one hand down into his sweatpants and take care of the most immediate of his (many, so many) problems. He’s slower, this time, tilting his hips up into it while he watches. He comes as Novak fires an ace down the tee; game, set and match on both sides of the tv, and it is a moment of such sublime absurdity that Gilles has to laugh, breathless, even as he arches up into his orgasm.

-

In a month he’s back on tour, working through the kinks in his rusty game match on match and in practice sessions with Jo or Gael or just his coach while doing the best job he can of avoiding Novak. The thing about tennis, though, is that it’s surprisingly insular at the top of the rankings, and there’s only so many times Gilles can duck out of sight behind a bank of lockers before the other players start spreading rumours that he’s crazy.

“Hey,” Novak says, catching him off-guard in the players’ lounge when Gilles is on his way to meet Jo, and his guard is down. “It’s good to see you. What are you, avoiding me?”

“ _Avoiding_ you,” says Gilles, forcing a laugh. He shoves his hands into the pockets of his jeans. “You shouldn’t flatter yourself.”

Novak laughs as well, and shrugs. “Well,” he says, “you don’t call, you don’t write. How’s the knee?”

“It’s good,” says Gilles. “No more pain.”

“No pain is good,” says Novak, smiling. “So you will be ready for our match?”

Gilles blinks. “Our match?”

“Yeah,” says Novak. “You know, the draw. The quarterfinals, maybe?”

“Oh,” says Gilles. “I did not – of course, yes. Yes, I will be ready,” he manages.

“Be there or be square,” Novak says. He gives Gilles a pat on the elbow before he starts to move away, saying, “So I’ll see you around, yeah?”

“Of course,” says Gilles, “see you around,” and watches Novak go while he wonders if it’s possible to justify a medical timeout during play for an emergency jerk-off. Because seriously, he is so screwed.

-

That night, Gilles looks down at the swollen curve of Novak’s belly and, even in the middle of the dream, says, “Okay, this has gone too fucking far.”

-

He corners Novak in the locker room the next day, when it’s late afternoon and everyone else has finished for the day, and there’s nobody but them and the quiet and the sound of water dripping somewhere. Novak is fresh from the shower, flushed and damp-haired, and Gilles is trying very hard not to be distracted by that.

“Hey,” says Novak, pausing from packing away his training kit. “What are you -?”

“You are ruining my life,” Gilles says, just a little too loud, so that his voice echoes back at him from the tiles, sharp and a little desperate.

Novak straightens. “Wait, sorry, _what_?”

“I just - you – you and your _Twilight_ – you have ruined my life,” Gilles says, and before Novak can interrupt he goes on, “with your vampires that sparkle and the – the dreams –“

“Dreams,” Novak says, with an eyebrow cocked.

“Shut up,” says Gilles. “So what I am going to do is, I am going to kiss you.”

Novak’s eyes go wider. “You’re –“

“Shut up,” Gilles says again, because he needs to get through this fast, so he can be done with it. “I am going to kiss you and it will be nothing like the dream and it will be terrible and then it will be over. Yes?”

But he knows better than to wait for Novak’s reply, so he just breathes in and fists one hand in the neck of Novak’s shirt to tug him closer, and Novak’s mouth is already half-open when Gilles covers it with his own and swallows down whatever smartass thing Novak was undoubtedly about to say. Novak exhales a sharp, shocked breath through his nose and this should all be so terrible and it is, until something strange happens and suddenly it isn’t at all, although it’s nothing like the dreams. Novak’s lips are surprisingly soft and his mouth is warm and generous, and he tastes a little like citrus in a way that Gilles wasn’t expecting at all but which isn’t unpleasant, and while Gilles struggles to process this Novak cups a hand to the curve of Gilles neck and starts kissing him in earnest.

“Okay,” Gilles says, when they break apart after an age, and he’s breathing hard against Novak’s cheek and wondering what exactly just happened to him, other than one of the best kisses of his entire fucking life. “That did not – did not go exactly to plan.”

Novak swallows; Gilles feels the stuttering movement of his throat against the back of his hand, still clenched in the neck of Novak’s t-shirt. Then he laughs.

“You know, I just meant that you look a little bit like that guy who plays the vampire in the movie,” says Novak. His fingers stroke a distracting pattern into the short hair at the nape of Gilles’ neck. “Nobody ever tell you that? That you look like, what’s his name, Robert Pattinson?”

“You,” Gilles says. “I - oh.”

“It’s okay,” Novak says, a smile curving the corners of his mouth. “He’s pretty hot.”

“Shut the fuck up,” says Gilles, and then makes sure that Novak does.


End file.
